Before the Kindle, Another Reading Revolution

Andrew Pettegree has dived into the history of the book just as its future seems most uncertain. His new work, The Book in the Renaissance,
came out a mere month before Barnes & Noble would announce putting
itself up for sale, reigniting debate about the end of print.

Pettegree,
the head of the School of History at St Andrews University in
Scotland, examines an earlier rocky transition in the history of the
written word: not the transition from print to digital, but the
transition from manuscript books to print. From his new survey made
possible by libraries' online presence, he argues in The Book in the
Renaissance that the early printed book market turns out not to have
been at all like what scholars previously imagined. Printers, pressed
by the tricky economics of the new technology, relied not on the famous
new Bibles but rather on cheap pamphlets and light literature to stay
afloat. News turned out to be a profitable area for these early
publishers. Scholars, meanwhile, worried that the new technology would
not so much advance civilization as degrade it, flooding the market
with cheap, error-ridden classics and a prodigious quantity of
non-scholarly rubbish.

Here, Professor Pettegree discusses the peculiarities of print in its infancy.

What did you find most interesting of the trends that you uncovered in your study of the early book industry?

Two
things. The first is the extent to which the new book market was
underpinned by books that hadn't played any role in the conventional
narrative of what's called the "print revolution." The earliest
commentators welcomed print, celebrating it as an essential part of the
civilizing process on the way to modernity.

But inevitably
this view concentrates on the most eye-catching of the newly-printed
books: the great Bibles of Gutenberg and Plantin, Copernicus and
scientific books, atlases, maps. The fact is that these big books
almost always lost money. The engine room of the new industry turned
out to be small books and pamphlets, at most two days' work in the
print shop, which could turn a quick profit. I think our project is the
first thing that has really spelled this out in quantitative terms.

The
second thing is our discovery of what you might call a two-speed
Europe. The conventional geography of print always emphasizes how
quickly it spread throughout Europe. Within 50 years of print's
invention, over 200 places had a printing press. But most of those
early presses only survived a few years—they quickly went out of
business and print contracted. What we discovered is around 85 percent
of print output was produced close to the geographical center of
European trade—in France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. This
was the heart of production. Outside this central zone, Spain, England,
Scandinavia, Eastern Europe had essentially dependent markets.

You
mention in your book that, contrary to what we might think today, there
was actually concern in some quarters that the advent of print would be
a bad thing for society, and would degrade civilization rather than
advancing it. What exactly were these folks worried about?

Fifteenth-century
scholars had a clear idea of what print could achieve but it was a
narrow and essentially selfish one: they wanted more and cheaper books
for people like themselves. They wanted cheap, accurate classics.

But
most of the first printers were not educated men—they were craftsmen.
Errors crept in, and the vision of a definitive accurate text proved
extremely hard to achieve.

The scholarly community also hadn't
reckoned with what you might call the democratizing impact of print. In
the Renaissance world education was very hard-won. Only people with
money could go to university and the texts they studied there were
expensive to procure. Students had to pay to have copied texts made
from master manuscripts. Print threatened to open education out to the
self-taught and the socially ambitious. It was this that early critics
of print latched upon when they spoke of, for example in the case of
one Filippo de Strata, "brutes" turning themselves into doctors.

So
it was not, in fact, when these first printers went out of business,
that there weren't enough readers—it was simply that the printers were
making the wrong thing?

Exactly.

The situation really is
that the first generation of printers, encouraged by scholars,
naturally produced the sort of books these people wanted. But it's hard
to apply this sort of commercial model—this small, bespoke model used
for manuscripts—to a new process that produces 300 or more identical
items. The irony is that there were plenty of other readers out there.
The first printers ignored the groups that we might call pragmatic
readers. Literacy was already widely-disseminated in the fifteenth
century. There were lots of people who could read but did not
habitually buy books, so the trick was to discover how to reach them.

One
of the ways to reach the masses and turn a profit wound up being news.
That seems very odd today in light of the struggling news industry. How
did news become a profitable line of work, and why were people suddenly
interested in consuming it in print form rather than orally?

This
is not always recognized, but there was a very healthy market for news
before printing. Merchants in particular had to know about far away
events before they dispatched their goods and they had a very
well-organized commercial service to meet this need. News was gathered
up in places like Venice and Rome because they were the keys to the
Mediterranean trade. Then it was copied out in professional copy-shops
and dispatched northwards to Germany and further afield to people who
paid a subscription for the service. It was an extremely well-organized
trade; manuscript newsletters continued into the 17th century because
they provided confidential news and were was regarded as being
high-quality.

It was the printers who realized there was a wider
public for this commercially-printed news and that, furthermore, news
print fit the economic needs of the trade. News books were always
small, fewer than eight pages, and could be turned out in two days on
the press.

Why is that so critical? If you finish a text in two
days you're making money back from it in two days. A major scholarly
text takes the best part of a year to produce, and you can't make money
from it until the very last page is printed.

Now: why does
news become printed rather than oral? Well, it doesn't replace oral
news culture. Printed texts really were a natural extension of
contemporary news culture, which included marketplace gossip and the
official pronouncements made from the town hall steps or the pulpit.
The two existed side by side, offering consumers a new layered market
of rumor, official proclamation, and print. But of course people in
this multimedia news world have exactly the same problems as we do
today knowing what to believe: news was not necessarily more true just
because it was printed.

You write, also, of news
ballads, specifically: news in ballad form, sold in pamphlets. Clearly,
we don't do that now. What was that like?

Remember this is an
age in which everybody sang. Singing was ubiquitous, whether in the
fields or in the medieval court in the form of epic verses. People were
particularly used to the idea of song as a pedagogic medium—Protestant
churches made use of this. The news ballad was a natural extension of
this lyrical world. Those selling news pamphlets or broadsheets would
often sing the song out in the marketplace, waving copies in their
hands to try to get people interested. In fact, in Germany, sellers of
news pamphlets were often known as "news singers" rather than "news
sellers." So that's why so much news is in verse form.

I think
it's also true that versal song was a very good way of cloaking
sentiments skeptical of authority, as well as a way of internalizing
bad news. If you're going to write about a defeat in battle it's easier
do that through a verse lament—lamenting the brave king who went to
his death—than it is in a news pamphlet, which sets these events out
in bald prose. Verse can approach the subject more obliquely.